


walking close at hand

by harmonising



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Growing Old, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, References to Depression, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-13 18:27:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28782699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harmonising/pseuds/harmonising
Summary: "We're like mirrors, us two," John says.Lennon and McCartney as reflections of one another. Or, a study about grief and the things one does to survive.
Relationships: George Harrison & Paul McCartney, John Lennon/Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney/Paul McCartney
Comments: 10
Kudos: 34





	walking close at hand

**Author's Note:**

> This veers slightly into what could be construed as surrealism, or an "enhanced" sort of bird's eye view of reality. The story mostly follows the parallel losses in John and Paul's lives, as well as how Paul specifically dealt with that mirroring, and with his own relationship to those deaths. Since this covers, albeit briefly, the period of the breakup, some direct references are made to Paul's depression and self harming behaviours at the time.

"We're like mirrors, us two," John says, a few months into their private playing sessions, half finished lyrics surrounding them. Paul stops fiddling with the chords and looks up at John, who is holding his own battered up guitar in a perfect reflection of Paul. The sight twists something pleasant at the tip of his stomach, and Paul thinks he understands exactly what John means.

"Contrariwise," he says, grinning. "And clockwise."

"Left side up, and right side down," John agrees, a matching grin on his lips.

John finds out about Paul's mother from Ivan. 

"But you talk about her-- You say she _is_ , Paul."

"Yes," Paul agrees. He will not look into John's eyes, refuses to acknowledge whatever pity or sympathy may be there.

"I would go mad," John admits after a while, his voice echoing soft and half broken in the quiet of his room. 

Paul looks at him then, unable to hold himself back, already terrible at ignoring John when he sounds that sad. "Who says I'm not?" Paul asks, trying very, very hard to sound like a normal person, like someone who hadn't locked himself in his bedroom for months on end, playing the guitar until his scabbed fingernails bled. "Who says I'm not mad?"

John only smiles at him. "Oh, _you_ are absolutely bonkers," he says, waving his hand as if dismissing any other notion. " _That_ was never under question," he clarifies. 

Paul feels himself relax, a half smile of his own starting to crack across his mouth. "But what if I'm contagious?"

John's smile turns into a conspiratorial grin. "Then we'll be mad as hatters _together_ ," he says. "All the best people are."

They both trip over the same loose rubble at a corner of Mathew Street. Paul first, then John, blind as a bat, falling along. 

"Such is their camaraderie," Ivan says, gesturing sagely at the two of them, "That whatever happens to McCartney will inevitably happen to Lennon."

John pokes him on the ribs at the same time as Paul decides to flick him on the forehead. Ivan smiles at them through his pained screeching. 

When Julia dies, Paul feels untethered, weightless with guilt. He touches John constantly, more than he has ever done before. John doesn't say anything about it, although Paul is sure he must have noticed. John doesn't say much of anything anymore most days. 

Paul shares a look with Pete Shotton when he comes by to drop a passed out John at Paul's house. "He isn't well," Pete says. "Best if his auntie doesn't see him like this." Paul nods at him and drags John up to his room, which has seen grief like this before, a space used to this type of sorrow.

Paul drags John most places these days. Goads John into going out with him, having lunch at the Jacaranda, having tea at his house. Paul touches him, tries to rearrange John's limbs in his tiny bed so he'll look less like a broken doll. The weeks following Julia's death, John's skin is always damp, as if he's running a fever. Paul pulls John's body into his, tries to warm them both up. But nothing shakes the coldness from him. The smell of fresh soil clings to John, like dug earth from a grave. 

"Anything that fucks you over," John singsongs, drunk and sneering with barely concealed anger. "I get fucked harder."

Paul tries to play along. "I can get fucked over much harder than you."

When John laughs, it sounds hollow.

When Stuart dies, Paul keeps an eye on George, changes rooms with John to watch over him, hovers like an anxious bird at an empty nest. That, of course, only serves to make George suspicious, makes him roll his eyes at Paul at a higher frequency than he already normally does.

"I'm not a child," George snaps when Paul tries to convince him to go home and not have a third pint.

Paul thinks back to his mother's medical books, cirrhosis and cancer and George, dead, rotten from the inside out. What had Astrid said about Stuart? That he had died slowly, in pieces, thin and pale, paler than he'd ever been, at the end. Paul watches George, prays that the thing skips him just this once, begs at God or fate or whoever, with a desperation he didn't know he could still feel.

Years later, when it is Tara that ends up dead, Paul almost laughs at the ironic cruelty of the delay, at how foolish he was to think he could run away from this.

  
Brian dies, and this is theirs, a shared grief, but no less heavy because it sits on four different shoulders.

"Am I part of the club now," George asks, and this is the first time they have spoken in days and days, maybe years. His voice cracks when he speaks, and he looks as young as he had the morning that Paul first saw him on the 86 bus, gangly and small, his legs dangling from the chair. Paul wants to hold him, wants it enough that it cracks at his inhibitions, makes him brave. He is surprised that George lets him close, and his heart breaks a little at that.

  
John says, "I want a divorce," and Paul hears the implication behind it. _I want this killed and quartered and buried_.

Paul gives him the wake he asked for.

  
Face down on his pillow, Paul considers simply not turning over. The thought twists his stomach into a knot, almost makes him smile. 

Then he thinks of Heather and baby Mary, thinks of Julian, and decides he won't give John the satisfaction of an easy way out.

When Paul breathes in, the fresh air almost chokes him.

"We're like mirrors, us two," John had said.

When Paul's father passes away, after Mike hangs up on him after hours and hours of soft spoken conversation, Paul stands by the phone and breathes in and out, over and over. He runs the set list for the next concert in his head, over and over. His thoughts swirl in mindless repetition, over and over, like the prayer beads in his mother's old rosary. In between breaths, he thinks about John's father, wonders who had brought it over whom this time around.

  
Paul tries to imagine what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out. "If I'm alive," he tells Linda, two days of no sleep, his eyes stinging with it. Trying and failing not to think of blood and the sound of crushed glass. "If I'm alive," he says, "then that means he's not dead."

  
When Mary turns fourteen, Paul goes into a frenzy of medical exams, paying people to prod and look into him to exhaustion. He goes into a diet, then stops a week into it because what if he's missing some vitamin or another, what if he's having too much or too little of what he should. He runs and runs until he can't feel his legs. His hair thins, and his stomach aches, and Paul thinks, _well, I'm_ waiting _, where are you, you bastard._

"You're fine," Linda tells him, smile teasing but not unkind. He can't make her go through this again, but he also cannot stop himself. "You're just old," she says, matter of fact, down to earth, as always.

Paul wonders how much longer he must carry this by himself, hates John for leaving him alone with it.

Paul holds George's hand in his and thinks, _take something of me, give him more time._ It doesn't work, of course, but he holds George anyway. "I love you," Paul tells him, the words crawling out of his mouth bloody and beaten, but still true, despite Paul himself. 

George, who doesn't so much as flinch when faced with death, merely smiles back at him, equally unafraid of Paul's ugly love. "Of course you do," he says, moving to hold Paul in his arms, breathing him in. "And I love you."

"You took a big risk, you know?" he says, kissing the crown of Linda's head. "Moving to a whole new country for some unwashed lumberjack."

She shakes in his arms, laughing at him. His heart swells with it, this simple joy of holding her near. "I was young and foolish," she says. He doesn't have to look to know the smile she has on. "And had a thing for beards."

He kisses her again, her soft hair tickling his nose. "Lucky me," he says through a smile of his own.

She turns around to kiss him on the lips. "Lucky you," she agrees. He wants to hold her forever, settles for holding her for as long as he can.

In his dreams, John asks for the lottery numbers and laughs when Paul tells him instead: "Leave me be. I'm a widow twice over now."

"Good," John says, grinning with a smile that Paul is afraid he's made up. "Good," he says, holding Paul's hand in a way he never did. Paul is older than he ever got to be, but not any wiser.

In Key West, John tells him, holding Paul's hand in his: "You can't die." 

He doesn't say it quietly, nothing like the words they had been whispering to each other before. "You can't die," John says, and his voice is clear, enunciating each syllable with a precision that veers into viciousness. In a night filled with oddities, this is the greatest one of them all, Paul knows. When John speaks, he is looking straight into Paul's eyes, and it sounds like an incantation, like John is staring the universe down, pushing it into submission. 

"You can't die," John says again, and the thunder shakes the house as if shuddering under the force of his command.

Paul lives, of course. He always does. It takes him a lifetime to learn how to live with it.

**Author's Note:**

> Alice Through the Looking Glass is, once again, referenced in abundance. Annie Get Your Gun is referenced briefly. The pillow incident in Scotland is recounted by Paul multiple times, and also on the book [Man on the Run](https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6114101/paul-mccartney-wings-beatles-man-on-the-run-book-excerpt). George's mother was diagnosed with cancer in late 1969, around the time of the famous "I want a divorce" meeting. Paul really was out of the country when his father passed, and Jim's death and the death of John's father did happen in close proximity of each other. Finally, though not mentioned explicitly, this story was heavily inspired by John's superstition that he was "a jinx on the male side of the family." (See Mark Lewisohn's Tune In and the original interview where Paul recounts this, given to Sir David Frost on Channel 5 in December 1997.)


End file.
